Are You Making Love or Just Having Sex?

It is often said that “making love” is just a euphemism for “having sex.” To be sure, these terms are frequently used interchangeably. Unfortunately, this common use (or misuse) can mask the important distinction between these two activities. Indeed, many people who have “good sex” mistake it for love only to find out that their apparent lover was not the person with whom they cared to spend their life.

This is not to proclaim the moral, or prudential, superiority of making love. Indeed some would prefer to just have sex. “Sex alleviates tension,” said Woody Allen, “Love causes it.” Still, it is important that one gets what one bargains for.

Of course, making love (as distinct from being in love) necessarily involves having sex. But having sex, even great sex, is not necessarily making love—just as a nice cool beer is not a glass of wine. Truly, some may prefer the taste of the one to the other, and a beer may be the drink of choice on a given occasion (say, at a Knicks game); but it would indeed be unfortunate if one ordered a glass of Merlot in an intimate setting and was served a Budd.

So are you making love or just having sex? Are you getting what you really want? And if not, how can you get it?

The first of these three questions can be answered only if one knows the difference between having sex versus making love. But this, in turn, requires pinning down the meanings of each.

According to philosopher Alan Goldman, sexual desire is desire for contact with another person's body and for the pleasure which such contact produces; sexual activity is activity which tends to fulfill such desire of the agent.

Goldman claims that sexual activity is not necessarily a means to any further end. For example, procreation is not the essential purpose of having sex; so you are not doing anything wrong (that is, misusing your body) if you are having sex without trying to get pregnant. Indeed, according to Goldman, there is no essential purpose to sex beyond fulfilling your desire for contact with another person’s body.

I think we can take Goldman’s account of sexual activity as a working definition for developing and contrasting the idea of love-making. Inasmuch as sex is a desire for physical contact with someone else’s body, it is a mechanical activity. Rubbing, touching, caressing, kissing, sucking, biting, and, of course, intercourse, as fulfillments of a desire for physical contact, are all sexual activities in this sense. Here, a key word is “mechanical” because these activities are essentially ways of mechanically stimulating or arousing oneself. Per se, they are self-regarding. They seek self-gratification—fulfillment of a purely self-interested desire. As philosopher Immanuel Kant stated, “Sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.” Here the idea that “sexual love” is self-regarding is clearly articulated by Kant. However, for Kant, it is in the transformation from self-regarding to other-regarding sexual activity that sex partners begin to see each other as persons rather than as mere objects or things. Thus he says, “under the one condition, that as the one person is acquired by the other as a thing, that same person also equally acquires the other reciprocally, and thus regains and reestablishes the rational personality.”

Such reciprocal sexual activity is, for Kant, possible only in the context of monogamous marriage where each sex partner gives the other a contractual right to the other’s body. In this case, mutual desires for physical contact with one another’s bodies are gratified by each sex partner. But while this mutual sexual agreement (whether inside or outside the context of marriage) may be a precursor to love-making, the latter takes more than mutual consent to let each other satisfy a sexual desire. This is because such mutuality is still mechanical and focused on one’s own state of arousal as distinct from that of the other and therefore fails to capture the intimate character of love-making. So Kant’s idea of “sexual love,” even in its mutual sense, is not truly that of love-making.

So what else besides mutuality is involved in love-making?

As distinct from mere sex, love-making dissolves the chasm between “you” and “me.” The resolution, however, is not “us” because “we” can still be divided. Instead, in love-making there is the mutual consciousness of unbounded unity without partition. “Love,” says psychologist Eric Fromm, is “in the experience of solidarity with our fellow creatures.” It is, explains Aristotle, “composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies." In making love, your loins are mine, and mine yours. The titillations of mine are yours also, and conversely. My past, present, and future; my hopes, dreams, and expectation; and yours, coalesce as one--not two--persons. There is resignation of separateness to inclusion of the other. It is an ecstatic resonance that defies any breach in Oneness.

It takes two to Tango, and so too does it take (at least) two to make love. Unreciprocated love-making is unsuccessful love-making. The flames of love-making are quick to die when one gives oneself, body and soul, only to be turned away. Where the other seeks only a body, wanting only sex, love-making is squandered even if it is not (at least at first) apparent to the one attempting to make love. It is a counterfeit if based on pretense because there is duality, not unity, and there is manipulation and objectification, not authentic, mutual respect.

As philosopher Martin Buber would express it, the intimacy of love-making is at the level of “I-Thou” as distinct from “I-It.” Thus, you cease to be an object or thing and instead become “Thou.” I am bound up with you as Thou and you with me. Of course, as Buber reminds us, the unity of the “I-Thou” is not permanent and I must at some point begin to see you as an “It.” For example, in touching each other’s body, each does what he or she knows is most erotically felt by the other. Here there is a sort of delicate, momentary analysis and deliberate targeting of a body part. But instantaneously each becomes Thou again with co-mingling of not just body but soul. In making love, there is thus a virtually seamless reciprocity between I-It and I-Thou.

There is also powerful symbolism in love-making as depicted. Foreplay gradually builds to climax as in the unfolding of a life of two living as one. As such, making love is inspirational, for it signifies and embodies two mutually living as one.

Erich Fromm maintains that there is separateness as well as unity in love; “In the act of loving, I am one with all, yet, I am myself, a separate, unique, limited mortal human being.” Here, Fromm is careful to stress that love (in all of its manifestations and not just in romantic love) is not bondage and subjection to another human being or denial of one’s autonomy. However, the mutuality of love-making as depicted here guards again domination, for the goal is not to control the other but instead to lose oneself in the other as the other in oneself.

This has implications for the cognitive, perceptual, and symbolic aspects of love-making. When one merely has sex, one perceives the other as an object of pleasure, as Kant describes. In mere sexual activity one may seek to dominate, control, and even humiliate in order to elicit sexual pleasure. Indeed, there are as many ways to cognize and treat one’s sex partner as there are ways the human animal can satisfy a sexual desire. But, love-making is unifying whereas these cognitions are relational and assume logically distinct beings. For example, masochistic sex—thinking of oneself as lowly and servile relegates oneself to something less than and therefore distinct fromone’s sex partner.

In contrast, the language of love-making involves thoughts (and perceptions) that unite rather than separate, divide, or alienate. “Two hearts beating as one” expresses a unifying metaphor, although it is not very sensual; while “I want to feel you all over” can be very erotic but still objectifying. “I want to get lost inside of you” can be both erotic and unifying. Unifying thoughts can be deeply personal and can replay in the mind’s eye moments of intimacy and solidarity. They can reflect tenderness; an adoring (or adorable) look; or the instant when you knew you wanted to be together for an eternity. They can be ineffable and unspoken; simply expressed; or set into poetic verse. “One half of me is yours,” speaks Shakespeare’s Portia ( in his Merchant of Venice), “and the other half—my own half, I’d call it—belongs to you too. If it’s mine, then it’s yours, and so I’m all yours.” In its diverse nuanced forms, from Shakespeare to the average Joe, the language of love-making symbolizes, and invites, the coalescence of two into one. In contrast, compare the dis-unifying, objectifying nature of the four-letter language of just having sex.

Adapting a metaphor gleaned from the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus, the unity experienced in love-making may be compared to an axiomatic system. Each axiom is essential to the system and cannot be understood apart from it; but the system itself is over and above and distinct from any of its axioms. Similarly, the unity of love-making is not possible without the two lovers, but it is over and above and distinct from them. So, in this sense, there is still distinctness in unity. But it is the Oneness of love-making that itself admits of no division.

Accordingly, it is essentially this unifying aspect of the activity of love-making that largely distinguishes it from mere sex. And here is a central “how” of love-making that follows from it: Surrender yourself to the other; sensually coalesce; and trust that the other reciprocates. For, like religious experience, love-making has an element of faith. If you attempt to have sex without such faith, then you will only have sex.

Transcend the self-interested desire for sexual satisfaction so that your sexual partner’s self becomes yours, and conversely, making the goal of other-regarding sex moot.

So, do you have to be in love in order to make love? To get a handle on an answer to this question you might consider what I have had to say in my blog on How good are you at making love? In any event, my considered judgment is that it can help to be in love. But this doesn’t mean that one must be in love. For I suspect that many people make love well before (if ever) they are actually in love.

Given its powerful symbolism, building a loving sexual relationship, as here described, may even pave the way to a more loving relationship beyond the bedroom. Try it out. The taste of wine is what you may crave. But sometimes one may also want a tall, cold one. So it doesn’t mean you can’t, when the mood is right, just have sex.

I have observed in my own marriage that --in our very busy lives with busy jobs, small children and aging parents-- our activity follows a tiered structure some similar to Maslow's hierarchy. We generally require that we are fulfilled at each level before moving up to the next. The tiers are:

Maintenance Activity - Meet our basic, physical needs, often wham-bam-transactional type activity... but the best we can do given opportunity and exhaustion levels.

Making Love - More relaxed, requires more time. This is when we connect and whisper sweet nothings and look into each others' eyes. We try to make time for this, but sometimes it's weeks between encounters. :( But we both know how important they are.

The 'Adventurous' Stuff - our favorite, and only takes place when we have time AND when we're fulfilled at the other two levels. In this activity, we live out some fantasies, and cater to other psychological, emotional and physical appetites. Doing these things --opening ourselves up, making ourselves vulnerable, and fulfilling often hard-to-explain 50-shades-type desires-- gives us a level of intimacy even beyond the 'Making Love,' level, although we certainly wouldn't give that up for anything, either. Before kids we used to this much more frequently. Now it's a couple times a year at best. I, personally, do miss that stuff, as does my wife. But time, money and responsibilities conspire against us. :)

It has been my experience that many people that believe they have been in love have only felt a state that mimics love:Stenberg's fatuous love.I see very few people that have intimacy in their relationship To make a relationship truly transcendental you have to have intimacy, and without it you are just simply having sex, using each other's body for pleasure. When you have the commitment, the sexual chemistry and the intimacy, that my friend, Is a winning combo that few experience.

You always being a widowhood is only for the old. Look at the young widows who try to keep searching the eternal commitmet to a spouse who covenant with other spouse like a temple. Sometimes it feels incomplete when one spouse marries but he or she does not want covenant to the other spouse. That is why we Americans have fake marriages by government not covenant marriages by God.

I hope you're young else you are wasting a life-time of opportunity. Do you ever wonder if there is "more"? Yes there is - l
earn the difference between sex and love-making and you will know how much more

Our love and intimacy is the subject of our writing (click my name) and we are so lucky that, even at 63 (me) and 66 we still have a wonderful intimacy, making love more than twice in the average week and occasionally even more often. I was even asked by my daughter in law if it was true we made love up to ten times per month. Her experiences were down to once or twice.

I suppose we have an undying love for each other and make the time to set aside special periods to experience each other. When you are retired you can do that more easily than as a business people or busy family people.

The difference between having sex and making love is huge. You can have the first without the second, but making love lifts every sensation and experience to its ultimate pleasure.

I mentioned no more than that I was a writer and people could find me if they wished. You, however, had nothing to say, did not read the serious message in my post about love into old age and are, in fact scared to even provide your name.

If you think I give a shit about one or two extra sales of my book and would go to all that trouble to promote it you are a bigger moron than I actually though you were.

Some people are interested in back stories to answers on this site and I could have cut and pasted whole sections from my writing.

In fact my writing can be read for nothing on my blog, which earns me two or three bottles of wine per month so don't accuse me of now plugging that.

I retired from my own business and am extremely well off and married to a man who was once a captain of industry, also very wealthy.

You need to grow up, prick. This is a question and answer forum, not your own personal rant blog. Anonymous idiot!

Allison. if you think Mary`s posting is nice, last week I bought a great new Audi Quattro from earning $6538 this - 4 weeks past and would you believe, 10k this past-munth. it's by-far the best work I have ever had. I started this 8-months ago and straight away made myself more than $69, per-hr. More Help http://www.jobs64.com

"But having sex, even great sex, is not necessarily making love—just as a nice cool beer is not a glass of wine."

If a brewery puts as much love into its beer as a vineyard does its wine, you get a product that is of equal value and craftsmanship. The same could be said for different forms of sex. As another reader posted, he and his wife engage in many different sexual activities, but that doesn't put any one kind above or below the other, it's the chemistry and quality of the interaction that counts.

"In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria." -Benjamin Franklin

I discovered this article in an effort to creat a dynamic for my husband and I to make love. We have never made love or really done anything exciting of the sort. I have made love to other men prior to our meeting each other. I often find myself reliving those encounters in my mind. Not the actual images of the other ppl but the euphoric emotional, stimulating, passionate, intoxicating memories of pure bliss that I felt with them sometimes scary producing an almost addictive aftermath. It is an amazing and scary thing to be lost in someone else and feel that there are no boundaries you wouldn't cross to feel this immense desire to please and have this other person. I often wonder if I had remained pure before marriage and had no knowledge of how amazing it could be would I be more fulfilled? Is my passion from my past a punishment for my fornicating ways. I feel so undeserving of a connection with my husband for having already engaged in what I felt was amazing often feeling addictive. Loving my husband is easy but him making love to me is non-existent.

I'm not sure how I ended up here but let me add something to what you've written.

It is a madness that you feel a guilt for the wonderful pleasures of connecting to humans. It's a dreadful shame really that your husband can't make love to you. After a virtually sexless relationship of a year, I determined never, ever to allow such a thing to happen. Sex is gorgeous and amazing!! It's totally pure at its best. If it is non-existent, find your passions elsewhere or end the relationship. Life is far too short to be restricted by guilt and repression.

I believe I feel much the same as you. I want to learn how to teach my husband to make love with me. When younger, in our early years, I had such a high sex drive that I was happy to enjoy the excitement and simple orgasm of having sex with him. Now I reminisce about the pure, overwhelming joy of making love with previous partners who just knew how to make love so beautifully. I love my husband very much and he clearly loves me. We're just so compatible on every other level so, like you, I wonder, if I had remained pure before marriage, would I feel so unfulfilled now? Is it only because a couple of previous partners happened to be just so good at making love? Then again, am I looking at the past thru' rose-tinted glasses, or is it just the reality that I'm getting older and sexual desire is not so easy to 'switch on'? Your final sentence fits my situation exactly: "Loving my husband is easy but him making love to me is non-existent".

I don't just know how to start am just short of word's and happy that i celebrate my Esther with my wife,Due to the help of Dr solution,This Dr solution has brought back happiness into my life that i have lacked for year,My name is Maxwell am from the United State of America,Am just so happy today and today has been the happiest day of my life and this happiness has brought me joy and am so happy,Because Dr solution brought back my lover Tricia into my arms without any delay,After my lover left me for good 2years,i was in deep pain and always thinking because i truly loved Tricia,Until a faithful day listen to the radio due to boredom,Then in which i had a lady shouting in happiness about the great thing Dr solution has done how Dr solution brought back her lover back into her arms within 36hours,when i had that goodness i decided in contacting Dr solution immediately,Because i was desperate in getting in touch with him,So i got in touch with him,Which then i told him my problem and he promised in bringing back Tricia back to my arms within 24hours,And then when i had that Tricia would be back to my arms within 24hours i was so happy and waiting to feel Tricia,And really Tricia came into my arms within 24hours,Begging me for forgiveness,i was so happy when i saw Tricia now my lover is fully back to my arms due to the help of this great man Dr solution who has bought back happiness into our great country(Usa)Please friend in need of help you don't need to go far all you need to do is for you to kindly contact Dr solution for help,Because he his trustworthy and straight forward,You can contact him on his private mail,solutionwhitmagicspell@gmail.com

In A world where feelings are aroused in a pious relationship for the indwelling yourself Where you raise the desire to surrender to GOD of love and your physique a temple rather An abode of a true feeling of belonging to each other. you are near to sublimation ... you attain some thing beyond the world and word of explanations ..a reliable sense you get and fulfilled moment of love you have been looking for since ages (YOU LIVE)
So do not ponder aimlessly,

One should try to look beyond the walls raised by putting hurdles, hindrances in your own created world where fleeing feelings have real meanings just have the likely( well) trusted depths of yourself like unexplored sea. Be prepared for ..... being accepted.Do not be afraid of ....being lost .there lies the next?

I am having great steaming sex with my neighbours husband, being a recently single 38 year old, i know what i like! Strange sexual chemistry between us.. His soft touch and passionate kisses drives me wild! I need to stop this craziness he has a family, and we are doing it right next door. I find myself dreaming of our encounters, and he leaves me wanting more... Am I just having exciting sex or is there more? I dont even feel guilty when i see his girlfriend and child.. His mere touch make me wet... How do i stop this before we get cought.. I dont want to brake up a family..
This is the best sex i have had ever...
He tells me he will never leave them, i respect that, don't want to marry him.. Just fuck his brains out!

I assume you are female and I am confuse why you use boyfriend and girlfriend sometimes and husband other times. Which is he?
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This man is obviously deceitful and untrustworthy. He is cheating on his family and disrespectful to you. You probably have to bite the bullet and walk away. Find the sex elsewhere.
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If you want more assistance you will need to send me an email. My contact details can be obtained by clicking my name.
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Drop him like a stone is my provisional advice.

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